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Gurkha Settlement Rights

The hon. Gentleman puts his point with a passion and directness that I can only admire. On 27 April, the "Channel 4 News" FactCheck rated the reliability of the figures of the Minister for Borders and Immigration as four. That was on a scale of one to five, in which the number five means that the claim""has absolutely no basis in fact."" In other words, the Minister's claim is a wild guess—just about as much of a wild guess as previous forecasts on immigration from his Department, which have proved to be wildly wrong. In fact, the Home Office estimate was based on a five-year-old figure for the number of Gurkha pensioners in Nepal of 36,000. We know from parliamentary answers from the Ministry of Defence that there are currently just 26,500 Gurkha pensioners, so even under the Home Office's own preferred methodology, the total, including dependants, would be 75,000 not 100,000, but that makes the assumption that every single one of those discharged servicemen would want to move.